Climbing the Staircase

“You have to work harder than…you think you possibly can… And it doesn’t matter how you get knocked down in life cause that’s gonna happen, all that matters is that you gotta get up.” – Ben Affleck

Intro

I’ve always seen life as a long, daunting staircase leading up to a door. Behind that door is everything I’ve ever wanted: dream schools, dream companies, dream grades.

Never in my life have I reached the door on the first try.

I was rejected from every school I truly cared about. In just the past year, I’ve been ghosted, rejected, or ignored by over 700 companies. I missed the GPA cutoff for my school’s one-year master’s program.

I could go on; my failures outweigh my successes by a mile, but you get the point.

Climbing

The staircase is long. Brutal. And most of the time, incredibly lonely.

There have been moments—heartbreaking, demoralizing moments—where after countless tries, I climbed all the way to that final step, only for it to collapse beneath me.

Picking myself back up, refusing to blame God, circumstance, or bad luck, and placing my foot back on that first step was almost as hard as the fall.

In my lowest moments, I’d joke with myself: maybe this time my “knees” are stronger or my “calves” can carry a bit more weight.

Each climb teaches you something, though. You learn how to balance better. How to fall softer. Maybe if you’re lucky (or stubborn or broken) enough, you reach the top. And if not, maybe you make it one flight higher before you slam into the floor again.

For me, climbing meant everything—networking at career fairs, prepping for hours, finally landing the Lucid final round—only to bomb it. It meant being waitlisted at Amazon, then dropped. Getting to the Palantir final round, then rejection.

It meant watching friends around me move on, take jobs, and celebrate wins, while I reset to floor zero, painfully telling my family “It didn’t work out. Again.”

But each time I fell, I got up—no matter how long it took. I wiped the sweat off my face, caught my breath, and sprinted back up.

Falling

That’s the whole point.

In the beginning, the first flight is terrifying. But then it’s familiar. Then easy. Then the second one is. And the third.

Eventually, you start seeing the patterns: in what the recruiters ask, in the LeetCode questions, in how you market yourself. You start understanding your wedge into companies—not just how they see you, but how you see them.

I stopped fearing rejection. I got so used to falling that nihilism gave way to fire.

I stopped chasing what was behind the door. I wanted to make my family proud. I wanted to destroy those who gave up on me.

And most importantly, I fell in love with falling, with software engineering, with technology.

That’s when things started shifting. I got offers from AWS. From a YC-backed startup.

But by then, they didn’t even matter.

The Door

So, what do you think is behind the door?

Gold coins? Applause? Your parents telling you they’re proud?

Because when you finally reach the top and open that door, all you’ll find is… the next staircase.

But by then, you won’t care. Because you’re not climbing for the door anymore. You’re climbing because you love the climb.

Don’t quit on me now.